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Stone Arabia: A Novel
Stone Arabia: A Novel
Stone Arabia: A Novel
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Stone Arabia: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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From the National Book Award nominated author of Innocents and Others and Wayward, “a smart, subtle, moving story about the complicated business of knowing the people you love” (Book Forum).

In the sibling relationship, “there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other,” says Denise Kranis. For Denise and her brother, Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music, always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik’s most passionate and acute audience; she is also the crucial support for Nik and for their aging mother, whose dementia seems to threaten her own memory. When Denise’s daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities escalate.

In Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta “explores the inner workings of celebrity, family, and other modern-day mythologies” (Vogue).
LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateJul 12, 2011
ISBN9781451617986
Stone Arabia: A Novel
Author

Dana Spiotta

Dana Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others; Stone Arabia, A National Books Critics Circle Award finalist; and Eat the Document, a finalist for the National Book Award. Spiotta is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel is Wayward. She lives in Syracuse, New York.

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Reviews for Stone Arabia

Rating: 3.7177418483870968 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

124 ratings13 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I didn't know quite what to expect from this; it was a random purchase on my part. I enjoyed the author's use of language, but the story, though it was strong enough to keep me reading, never really demanded my attention.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Nice...!! .
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Denise and Nik are brother and sister, orbiting one another. Nik is a musician who creates his own world.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a curious little novel seemingly focused on the oddly curated life of a small-time rock star—in actuality, it aspires to examine postmodern culture’s impact on our ability to connect with each other in emotionally meaningful ways. The majority of the story is narrated by Denise, the younger sister of Nik Worth, an inscrutable musician who seems to prefer living in a fictional world that he curates through self-produced music, ghost-written reviews of said music, obituaries, and “chronicles” that he produces, documenting his not-quite-authentic life. Denise, single, in her 40s, with an adult daughter whose documentary film about her uncle rests yet another layer upon his palimpsest of a life, struggles with her memory—she has trouble recalling names, dates, events—and news stories about tragedies (missing children, terrorism, torture, mass murder) seem to affect her more powerfully than events in her own life or in the lives of her family members.An omniscient narrator takes over briefly— and rather abruptly—when Denise seems to struggle the most and then relinquishes the narration back to Denise; in addition, the novel’s structure mirrors the circuitous path of Denise’s free-associative mind (her narration is often sidetracked by digressions). It’s never quite clear whether Denise is a reliable narrator, since the story itself frankly questions the nature of memory, truth, and reality. It’s a curious and compelling read that wraps up with an inconclusive mystery, much as it began.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In Stone Arabia author Dana Spiotta examines the fraught bonds between two siblings. Brother Nik is a rock star manqué; as he approaches the age of fifty he is still living out the fantasies of his youth by spending most of his time recording idiosyncratic albums and writing fictitious reviews of them. His more practical sister Denise is his enabler. The plot revolves around Denise's attempts to understand and support her brother, even as he's flirting, as a rock star would, with his own death.Stone Arabia tells a decent story, and the writing is good, but I was expecting more from it than it actually delivered. The novel contains many references to George W. Bush-era current events, which make it seem dated without being historic. The scene that involves "Stone Arabia" is not striking enough to justify naming the whole book after it. Furthermore, as far as I was concerned, the novel had too much Denise and her pretentious filmmaker daughter Ada, and only glimpses of Nik.A side note: Spiotta's depiction of Nik is highly reminiscent of the outsider musician Jandek, a mysterious figure, who, like Nik, records in a variety of styles and is the sole artist on his own boutique "record label". Jandek rarely appears in public and communicates with his select group of fans by mail. I don't know that Spiotta has ever heard of Jandek, and she claims in her afterword that Nik is based on her stepfather, but to me the similarities between Nik and Jandek are too numerous to be coincidental. Stone Arabia is a quick read, so if you are intrigued by the premise, I recommend it to you despite my reservations.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I've now read each of Spiotta's novels, and all of them were fascinating period pieces. I don't mean she really caught the spirit of the '90s in her first novel, the '70s in her second, and the '00s in this one. I mean her novels are exactly what people will think of when, in a few decades, they talk about early 21st century American literary fiction. There is much existential angst about meaninglessness, empathy and emotional distance. There is stuff about new media. There is metanarrative. There is some very mild formal trickeration, but not enough to scare anyone. There is tired mumbo about "memory", a theme and abstract noun that should really be banned for a few decades at least.

    This is frustrating because (not Spiotta's fault, I know) she's feted as "a major, unnervingly intelligent writer" by people who really should know better (Joy Williams, Sam Lipsyte, Michiko Kakutani, Thurston freaking Moore). That kind of praise made me buy her books. It also set up false expectations.

    Anyway, Spiotta is definitely getting better as a novelist. Lightning Field was distressingly bad; Eat the Document was kind of disappointing; the first half of this book is pretty good. The trickeration is contrived, but also entertaining (musical genius brother writes fake Chronicles of his life; average sister Denise writes Counter-Chronicles of those Chronicles--and, eventually, Denise's daughter makes a film about her uncle). Denise is far more entertaining than Spiotta's third person narrator, though far less entertaining than her brother. A book that was just some Chronicles, some counter-Chronicles, and bits of the film could have been fascinating.

    Instead, Denise has to worry about the form her Counter-Chronicles take (because metanarrative worrying), which becomes an excuse for shoving bits in to the novel that don't really belong there (mother is dying; world is going to hell but we either feel too sad or not sad enough about it; memory is interesting but also misleading, right?).

    How long, dear reader, do you think a novel has to be before it can successfully deal with the themes of: memory, family, aging, death, art, populism vs elitism, imagination, empathy, world politics, new media, self-destruction, CHILD ABDUCTION, THE AMISH, INTERNET MEDICAL ADVICE, POPULAR CULTURE, AND ZOMBIES?

    Okay, there are no zombies.

    But if you answered 230 pages, congratulations, this is the book for you, and I envy you your ability to think that 'successfully dealing with' is actually a synonym of 'mention in passing'.

    I really, really, really hope Spiotta follows her character into isolation for the next twenty years and works on a long enough book for long enough to really fulfill her ambition to write about fucking everything. That would be worth doing. A fourth short book about everything, however... we probably don't need that.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ostensibly about a brother and sister, he self-obsessed and she obsessed with him, this novel strikes me as a profound reflection on our society as it now is.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked the idea of this book and the character of Nik Worth is new and genius. Towards the end, though, I felt as if the dots didn't all connect and it was just random musings.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Denise and Nik are brother and sister, orbiting one another. Nik is a musician who creates his own world. His music is self-published and distributed to only a few people. His sister may be his complete audience. Nik creates complex record albums, imaginary fans and writes his own reviews. He keeps detailed journals, Chronicles, that blur reality and his fantasy life. While he creates himself, Denise barely seems to exist, except in response to others -- Nik, her daughter, her mother and the people she sees on the news. She seems to have no barrier between herself and the world she sees. And yet her observations of the world ring so true. The book puts all purpose in life, in reality, to question.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Skillful handling of unoriginal material.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of the best novels I've read in the last few years. To me, this is the book that "A Visit to the Goon Squad" wished it was -- the characters are eccentric but fully realized and dimensional within the confines of a somewhat spare tale. The genius of this work lies in Spiotta's depiction of the ways in which the characters' expectations morph into somewhat deflated middle-aged realizations. This is a brilliant meditation on the nature of obsession, memory and most of all the nature of art itself. It is a thoughtful, precisely written novel that encapsulates broad themes within sharp prose. Spiotta also nails the late seventies and early eighties music scene as perceived through the astute lens of her main characters, Nik and Denise. It is a chronicle of genius, demise and persistence.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Denise is the narrator. She is a 47 year old single mom of Ada. She focuses on her brother who has constructed a fantasy world of his imagined life as a rock star and --less so-- on her mother who is slowly descending into dementia--something she is afraid may foreshadow her own future. She is also bothered by how her life has not become what she thought it would be and concerns about how it is even possible to cope with the world today. Her brother has come up with a satisfying way of coping with his failure, but she is still struggling with hers. The ironic title comes from the name of an Amish town in NY where a girl was abducted. The image of how the Amish reject modernity and self-promotion stands as a counterpoint to the LA superficial and rootless lifestyle that Nik and Denise grew up in. Clearly the Amish have a way of coping with the world by withdrawal, not unlike Nik.I wish Ada and Denise's mom had been developed more. Ada seems to be quite a competent young woman who does not have the self-doubt that her mother has and may have a more realized life--or maybe not? The mother is just an enigma.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Denise and her older brother Nik grew up in the Los Angeles rock and roll scene of the 70's and 80's. Now middle-aged, Denise lives alone and agonizes over her obsession with stories of suffering on the cable news channels and her own perceived memory loss. Nik, who experienced limited success with his rock band experimentations in his youth, has spent his adult life in relative solitude chronically his music and songwriting that he produces solely for his sister and only a handful of others. Nik is truly a vituoso talent, and like other reclusive artists, he doesn't seem to need an audience to create. The author writes "One wonders, or at least I wonder, what happened to these people? Not the one-hit wonders but the no-hit wonders?"Denise is the responsible one. As she cares for their aging mother who is experiencing dementia, she worries about her own memory. When the author writes of Denise's realization of the memories that we retain, the memories of the body-- of the senses, she truly hits the mark. Perhaps it is because these characters are my age, but I was greatly moved by their experiences and their decisions on how to enter the second halves of their lives. Denise says in my favorite quote--"The second half of my life was just the bill due for the pleasures of the first half." With its shared setting and themes, Stone Arabia makes a wonderful companion read to this year's Pulitzer Prize winner A Visit from the Goon Squad. I may even prefer it.

Book preview

Stone Arabia - Dana Spiotta

THE CHRONICLES

July 1, 2004

Dear Ada,

It is nearing midnight, and I can’t wait to leave this travesty of a day behind. It was not good or happy or kind. It took a long time to get here, and it will take a long time to leave. Be warned, I feel disoriented. But I will proceed in the finest faith I can muster. I must take care. Because, as we know, memory all too easily accommodates the corruption of regret.

You may surmise that I have had something to drink. This might make you think I am being hyperbolic or histrionic or that word that makes all women of my age cringe, hysterical. As if my hormones or my uterus (the Greek word for womb is hustera, etc.) were the engine of my writerly ablutions. That’s not it. Mostly I am writing because I know and see things no one else does. Because I have to. It is my job, my assignment. I am on the verge of elation. Liberated. Part of me feels relief, I cannot deny it.

I will elaborate, I promise.

Oh, for God’s sake, Denise said, barely audible in the empty room. Is this really what she was left with? Another overly elaborated joke?

How peculiar this feels: before tonight I never imagined I would try to write about anything, much less this. I don’t mean I don’t understand why people write. Written words demand the deep attention that spoken words just aren’t entitled to. Writers get to pull something solid out of our relentless, everyday production of verbal mucilage. A writer is a word salvager and scavenger and distiller.

As you know, I have occasionally fixated on words—I love to talk and sometimes words come out with embarrassing urgency. I can feel them as almost physical things as I push breath into them. This, I am afraid, is a consequence of solitude. Spoken words become extravagant and magical, and I admit that I have, on more than one occasion, caught myself speaking my thoughts aloud, as though vocalizing them gave them an extra reality, but I don’t think I ever felt any urgent expressive needs about actually writing words down. No desire to extrude something that would endure beyond my mere mortal squeak. Except now, when writing them down seems not to be about cheating the given human terms but instead simply a way to relieve my isolation. The artistic impulse, wrote Colette, even more than the sexual impulse, breaches the barriers. So be it—smash these walls down. Raze them to the cellar.

Denise stopped reading and took a long breath. And then another. She swayed and steadied herself against her brother’s desk. She realized she had been holding her breath as she read. And standing. She pulled out his desk chair with her elbow. She did not put the letter down. She held it in her hand, her index finger and middle finger keeping the last page distinct from the first. She sat on his chair and leaned toward his desk.

Her damp hair stuck to the back of her neck. She should take a sip of water, something. Denise read on to see what Nik had Denise say next.

The simplest answer and probably the most accurate answer is that Nik’s art was his life. And I don’t know what that means about a life. I have always resisted artistic impulses of any kind. I always believed that if you weren’t good, what right did you have to do it? This question dates back to when I did try, for a time, to be an actress. A deliverer and even exalter, I imagined, of all those delightfully rescued and worked words, phrases, and sentences. At seventeen I even enrolled in a very exclusive acting workshop. You didn’t know this, did you? But I must confess my initial appearance there, like many things in my life, was accidental. The class met at an equity-waiver theater on Melrose Avenue every Wednesday night. He was a famous teacher; he coached serious movie actors. He would be hired to be on set during important scenes. He held secrets, we were led to believe. And despite how cliché this may sound, I was not even intending to audition for his class. I was there with a friend who wanted to audition. My friend Avril (who burned to be an actor from the moment she saw Judith Anderson’s repulsive-yet-compelling performance in Hitchcock’s brilliant domestic torture film Rebecca), wanted to go and I came along to help her. We did a scene from Done by Hand. I played Janice. I knew nothing about acting. I had no desire to act. But, in the same way a broken clock is right twice a day (I apologize for another cliché), anyone can act for one scene if the one scene happens to require the exact comportment with which you are naturally inclined to when on stage. So in this specific role, in this specific scene, my fontal rush of propulsive fear, my prickly self-strickenness, and my strangled underlaugh that was (and still is) a result of what Sigmund Freud identified as the liminal dilemma between the intense desire for supplication and the concurrent need for masochistic provocation all combined to create an illusion of a brilliant stage presence, bursting with potential and future possibility. All of which I didn’t have—not as an actor, certainly.

So I was astonishing, a dazzling creature of tangled, alluring complexity. For five minutes, at seventeen, in the Barbara Stanwyck Theater on a Wednesday.

I said my last line, blurted it in a manic breath. I heard the famous teacher say, Stop there. I felt dampness leaking under my arms; I was glistening with what I would have guessed is called flop sweat; I could even feel a trickle down the side of my neck. I opened my eyes (they must have been closed for the entire last line). Avril stared at me, her lips quivering. Her face was red and she was clearly on the verge of tears. Was I that bad? I could feel the whole room on the edge of a deep intake of breath, and then into the breach came an avalanche of intense applause. What a thing, Ada. The rough din of all that sudden hand-smacking: you actually can feel it as well as hear it. It is an assault; it is as if they are trying to break in to you somehow. They are laying a claim to whatever it is you just created. I nearly fainted.

The teacher appeared out of the dark and mounted the stage. He waved his hand at the audience and the applause abruptly stopped. His face betrayed no apparent pleasure or displeasure: it was a studious, controlled expression. (One should expect nothing less from an acting teacher than control of the face.) Then I realized his intent, his concentration, was fixed. And it was not fixed on Avril; it was fixed on me. I was along to merely assist, but I was asked to join the workshop on the spot and Avril was not.

Looking back, I must concede there was a little more to it than my coincidental impersonation of a gifted actor. The more to it that I am alluding to is the way I looked. This is a sketchy thing to discuss, but I was frankly pretty in a very actressy way. I had that extra-pretty shine that seems to fix to actors, a shimmery charisma that you can’t miss even if the actor has unwashed hair and no makeup on. I saw Cary Grant, once, at the Beverly Center on a Saturday afternoon. He was silver-haired, way past his heyday. Yet he was that extra-shiny thing, a gorgeous old man, not at all like anyone else there. What is more, he seemed to suck up all the attention in the place, he was like a black hole, drawing curiosity and desire like matter toward infinity. And it had nothing to do with fame, at least not for me, because I didn’t even recognize him. I noticed him before I saw everyone whispering and I discovered who he was. A young woman pushed the shopping cart as he strolled alongside; he appeared conspicuously unaware of the gaze of others as he attended a cantaloupe with an outstretch of his cashmere-covered arm. His power came from his electric prettiness, his extra glow. If we were all in a painting, he would have one of those intricate halos around him, gilt-traced, radiant. That’s exactly what it was, a radiance that felt holy. At least as holy as one could feel shopping at the Beverly Center on a Saturday afternoon. I nearly stopped and applauded as he walked by. We all nearly did.

My extra-prettiness was a minor version of that. I had the regular, symmetrical features of a pretty girl. I had the slim yet plush figure of the standard object of desire. And on top of that I had this little sparkly extra thing, the thing that makes people think you ought to be an actor, the thing that makes everyone sneak disbelieving glances at every detail of you. (Does the exquisite hollow of her philtrum meet her lip at exactly the most alluring depth? Yes, it does. Do her tiny pale earlobes hang only halfway before attaching in the most elegant and demure way? Oh yes. And so on.) I still have some remnant of that kind of beauty, but even I know that it really peaked for me at around seventeen. Some women grow into their peak beauty: they are deep, powerful creatures. Some women seem to miss it entirely, the sum of their pieces becoming somehow less than is really fair. My mother was in the latter category. Her attractiveness had always felt unrealized. She was fifteen pounds away, or she needed a new haircut, or clothes that fit her better. But that was an illusion. She just didn’t add up in quite the right way, and no matter what she did, there would always be something just out of reach for her. She was a woman who always appeared past her peak but who actually never had a peak. And then other women, like me, peak very early. It is a subtle distinction. I mean, I was still quite pretty at twenty-five. I am still reasonably, wearily pretty at forty-seven. (Way prettier than I need to be, especially now that I am a writer.) But when I was on stage at the Barbara Stanwyck Theater, in that audition for that very exclusive acting workshop, it was natural for people to mistake me for a born-to-be-a-star type. I looked like someone whose fabulous peak was yet to come. (Because what peak beauty ever reads like a peak? It must all be becoming, it must all be a leap into the future for a woman.)

He, the famous teacher Herbert Mintov, stopped the applause and we all stood there. He ignored Avril and looked into my face. I remember he cupped my face with his hands, but I am sure that can’t be right. That would be creepy. Herbert was full of all sorts of character flaws, but he would never have made the mistake of appearing creepy. So he didn’t actually touch me, but he did something that was an appropriate teacherly version of that, something along the lines of opening a hand toward me, nodding sagely at me, and saying I was invited to join the class. As I recall, nothing was said to Avril, and so it was with the brutal terms of the acting world. How could I refuse? I had no idea what I was going to do in this life. When you grow up in Los Angeles, sooner or later it occurs to you that acting could be your calling. Especially if you were more or less recruited, Schwab’s-style, into the thing.

As you might have guessed, my acting career went steeply, vertiginously downhill from that first brilliant peak. Herbert’s mistake soon became clear to me, Herbert, and the other students. (But not Avril, of course, because we were no longer friends. She was convinced, and she could have been right, that I upstaged and displaced her. That she never had a shot. Which might have been true, but it certainly wasn’t on purpose. And my refusing Herbert’s invitation would not have furthered her cause in any way, that was clear. I do think it gives the lie to one acting cliché: it isn’t true that if you surround yourself with brilliant actors you will only look better. What is true is you will look weaker. All other actors are your enemy, tarnishing and interrogating your aura of holy radiance. What you need is to be surrounded by serviceable, competent journeymen. Avril learned that and so did I.)

I hate, so deep in this little digression, to insert yet another actor cliché, but if I’m here for anything, it is for truth, for disclosure, for the full story, no matter how tacky that full story might make me seem. It will all, in the end, figure in to the decisions I have made recently. All mistakes lead to further mistakes: all we can do is make a plausible, causal accounting. And maybe I can be excused for the predictable trajectory of my actor’s journey. Here it is: I did have an affair with Herbert. Of course I did.

But I really should get back to the story of Nik, I should have said how all of this pertained to Nik. Nik, unlike me, never had a doubt about who he was or what he wanted to do. He didn’t wait for people to tell him what he was good at. He didn’t just go along with some authority figure the way I just joined Herbert’s acting class because I was invited. I don’t think you could flatter Nik into doing something he didn’t feel all the way through him. But me, I had to say yes to Herbert’s offer, and then I had to sleep with Herbert, too. I don’t need to invite your disgust by going into the details of our lurid assignations. I did start it, I think it is important to be truthful about who initiated things. I knew Herbert wanted me, that was obvious. So I started an affair with him because I felt sorry for him. I was such a terrible actress, he was so completely wrong about my potential, and there he was, stuck with me in class. I brought the whole place down. I was so stiff and self-conscious on stage that I made everyone—all these talented, ambitious actors—hate acting. They would watch me do a scene, and they would think: I hate acting, I hate actors. I quit. I know this was how they felt when they watched me. When you aren’t good at something, you just make everyone despair about anything ever being good again. That is why Gertrude Stein said Bad art smells human in all the wrong ways. And bad stage acting is the worst of all—you are stuck right in the room with the embarrassment of the actor’s failure. You become a party to the failure. And there I was, in this room full of very talented actors, actors who could take you to the depths of anyone’s soul. Actors willing to enliven the most hated skins, actors capable of impersonating—of infusing personhood into—whatever words some dark little writer piled up on a page. And they did it with flesh and spirit, they did it with breathing, they did it with finely elucidated human detail. These actors were Zen geniuses, selfless beings capable of both extreme control and fearless spontaneity. They could listen and react to each other, and yet they were disciplined in their devotion to text and coherence. They observed every little self-revealing tic and gesture. They had such endless insight into the compelling whys and ways of human behavior. They prized the integrity of the souls they created; they were fearless.

Except, of course, when they watched me.

Or even worse, when they had to perform with me. I embodied their rediscovered fear. As the class continued, my bad acting became more and more elaborated and intricate. I have to be exact about this—if there is any possible accomplishment in these sentences, it dwells in exactitude. So here is not just how bad I was but how I was bad: I wasn’t lazy. I memorized my lines (by rote and repetition, by groping, by blind will). I wrote notes in the margins. I thought of Motivations. Objectives. Actions. As-ifs. I dutifully penciled them in. I had, I believe, deep insight into the characters I was assigned. I would go to the library and do research. When I was supposed to have pleurisy, I read every detail of what pleurisy does to you (it creates a heaviness in your lungs, labored breathing, and knifelike cutting pain in your chest). I read about the Depression. I read about St. Louis. I worked hard at my acting. I am, if nothing else, an extremely hard worker. I have always worked hard because I have always had to.

You must understand something: Nik and I went to crowded urban public schools. We lacked supervision, parental or any other kind. Necessarily, our education was an act of autocarpy. We didn’t know a thing we didn’t teach ourselves. Nik found a way to revel in his self-conjured education and even saw it as his strength. As the twelfth-century literary genius Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail wrote in his primordial epic novel, Philosophus Autodidactus: The feral child will develop the purest form of creativity. But for me it was different: my feral childhood left me hounded by doubt. When you are self-taught, you get a lot of things wrong. You mispronounce words because you never actually heard anyone speak those words aloud. You use what linguists call hypercorrect language that is in fact not correct, like sticking whom all over the place. Or you use the first-person subjective pronoun I even when you should use the first-person objective pronoun me because you think the word me is only for selfish children. You try to never say the word like, because you can’t be sure how to do it without thinking about it. You learn to second- and triple-guess your instincts, which can really change how you make your way through the world. You are slow because you have to take the long way around to everything. No utterance comes without labored preparations. None of this weighed on Nik, but I always found it humiliating that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. So my hard work, unlike Nik’s, was underwritten by a kind of despair. I worked desperately hard, you see? I couldn’t give up. I was

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